Currently, searching for items for procurement is a rather complex affair. Not only must a person know specific pieces of information about the item he wishes to find, he must also know how to properly input his request into a computer, so that the computer properly understands his request. It also happens that different procurement systems use different terminology and formatting so that a proper request on one procurement system will not be proper on another one. For example, a search done on one current e-commerce procurement system solution requires the following kind of formatting in order to return a proper search of a bolt with a ⅝″ length and ¼″ diameter head: bolt, len 0.625, diameter 0.25. This method, and similar types of methods are not very intuitive to a novice user, and allow for a significant number of formatting mistakes. A misspelled word or misplaced comma will cause a search to fail wasting valuable time, and causing needless frustration to a user.
As another example, if one wishes to search for a specific manufacturer's kind of bolt, the user must know the precise manufacturers' name or at least the code by which the procurement system refers to that manufacturer. If that information is inputted incorrectly, the search may very well come up empty and thus make the user think that the manufacturer doesn't make that kind of bolt. This, of course, may very well be not true because, for example, the user accidentally spelled the name of the manufacturer with a “c” instead of a “k”, or inputted the improper code for that manufacturer and thus the search would not have any results for that misspelled manufacturer. The same undesired result might happen if the user did not know that the real name of the item in question did not have the name “bolt” in it (yet it was often referred to as a bolt). The system would report an empty result, yet the item is abundantly in stock.
Even if the user was correct about the name and type of item he is searching for, the list returned of possible matches could very well be unmanageable. Thus a typical search also includes other attribute characteristics of the item in question to narrow down the possible matches. A user must be familiar with terminology for the kinds of attribute characteristics of an item to help narrow down the results. For instance, one system might refer to the width of an item by “w”, yet another might refer to it by “wid”. Again the improper nomenclature on a system will cause the system to return an incorrect result. Not only must a user be familiar with the proper names of attribute characteristics in order to narrow his search, but he must also be aware of what the attribute characteristics are of a particular item. For instance, if one was told to find a standard hex-head bolt with a grip length of 3.18 mm, a length of 25.4 mm, and a hex size of 11.11 mm, here are some questions one might have: What is grip length? Is the grip length from the end of the bolt or the end of the threads? Is the hex size from bolt head point or the bolt head flat? These questions demonstrate how much knowledge a user must have about the item he is searching for, before he looks for it. On these traditional systems, without such knowledge a user has little chance of a successful search without outside assistance.
What if a user wanted to search by more than one attribute characteristic? Currently, to do so a user might then narrow a search by specifying that the length of the item needs to be less than 10 inches and the width greater than 16 feet. To create such a request a user needs to be familiar with how the system requires the input of such relationships and multiple criteria. To specify the above criteria the proper entry might look like this: l<10″ and w>16′, or this: l<10″^w>192″, or this: len less 10 in and wid more 16 ft. Again without knowing the specifics of a particular system, a user will have little success searching without training and practice.
It is clear from the above examples that a user needs to be familiar with many different aspects of search terminology and of the item itself before coming up with a proper search before the user even gets to look at the results. A user needs to know what attribute characteristics describe the specific product, what the abbreviations of those attribute characteristics are, how to specify a maximum, minimum or exact boundary of that attribute, what kind of measurements are relevant to such an attribute characteristic and how to specify them (feet v. inches, meters v. inches, feet v. millimeters etc.), and an understanding of how connectors (and, or, not) work to combine multiple search criteria. After all of this, a user must then still enter the search in a way that the system expects or all is for naught. Thus the user is assumed, by these traditional systems, to have a tremendous amount of innate knowledge of a particular system when performing a traditional search on a procurement system.
It is clear from the above, that just to get results that match a specific query, a tremendous amount of effort must be made by a user to format that query properly. There always is a danger that when a result is given to a user, it might not be exactly what the user wants, not because of the data supplied, but because of the order or format it was supplied in. Thus, system searching dependence takes valuable time away from the true purpose of a procurement search system, i.e. to locate a particular item fast and efficiently without mistakes.
There has been a long standing need for a search system that would allow users to search for items in a way that doesn't require them to know specific formatting and syntax requirements for each system. There is a further need for a search system to convey to a user what the attribute characteristics of a specific item are, so that a user can narrow a search quickly without full knowledge of the desired item. There is a further need for a system to simplify how a user inputs specific attributes, i.e., specific values for the attribute characteristics, as well as reducing the amount of errors that often happens when doing so. There is a further need for a system to eliminate the uncertainty of the “formatting error” of a search so that when the system returns no matches, the user knows it is because there are no items based on those specific attributes, and not because the user improperly formatted a search. The present invention addresses all of these concerns.